Kyary in Sydney 2016

June 25th, 2016

The fashion monster of Japan is back to Sydney for another live concert! This time as part of her 5 year anniversary world tour. Once again us Kyary lovers gathered to watch the pop idol perform. This time however, they had an option of VIP tickets, which allows the fans to get a photo taken with Kyary herself! (photos done by professional photographer and will be available for download on the 4th of July; See below!). Also included in the VIP package was the chance to be first in line for good and first to access the concert hall, which equals front a row position! That was probably the main reason that made this concert so much better then the previous – the opportunity to be really close to Kyary and actually see her face and cute smile.

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Why I Make

June 21st, 2016

Adam Savage, one of the hosts of Mythbusters is in Sydney at the moment, so I looked through his tweets and found this video he stared in. Adam starts off by saying that making, is creating something that didn’t exist in this world. That is right, we as humans have an incredible ability to, literally, make anything possible. We can be all artsy and draw a painting, shoot a movie, compose a music piece, or we could be scientific and discover an element, calculate a physical value, compute code, etc…

I would like to say why I make. I make because I want to change the world. As corny as it sounds, I want to leave the world a better place then I found it. I want to use my skills to make peoples lives better. My skills are primarily focused around technology, but I believe that I have the ability to improve on things that most people would not care about, mainly UI and UX. There are designers out there that create great user experiences, but a lot of our interactions with technology are clunky, rough and just annoying at times. So I think it is important for people, that stop and think about the little things to exist, so that the people that don’t, have a much smoother experience and continue doing what they are best at.

As Apple said in their 2013 WWDC video:

If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? We start to confuse convenience with joy, abundance with choice…

I think is where I started to feel like I can make a difference if only I slowed down and looked around at what is around me.

I wish that everyone would continue making, would continue creating, would continue doing what they can to make this world better for everyone.

Spotlight Search

June 19th, 2016

If you use keyboard shortcuts, macros and various other workflow automation techniques, then you might consider yourself a power user. However if you have never used Spotlight on macOS and iOS, you are missing out on a great productivity improvement. So what is Spotlight? It is the universal search implementation on Apple platforms. It can search your folders, files, information from within apps like contacts, mail, and even suggestions from the web. But I guess the most used function of Spotlight is to quickly open the application you need. So instead of looking of looking for that one app in Launchpad on your Mac, or numerous screens of your iPhone/iPad, you can just simply launch Spotlight search (cmd+space on macOS, swipe down on home screen on iOS) and start typing the name of the item you are looking for. This can greatly speed up your workflow and just help you find what you are looking for.

Now that you know the basics of Spotlight, here are some advanced tips and tricks (on macOS), which I learned from this article:

  • Cmd + D:  View search term in the built in dictionary app (opens the app).
  • Cmd + L:   Quickly view the term in the dictionary (via Spotlight UI).
  • Cmd + B:   Do a web search in your default browser (opens browser window).
  • Cmd + R:   Open the highlighted results folder in the app which it is in and reveal it in Preview.
  • Cmd + O:   Open the highlighted result in the default program for that filetype.
  • Cmd + I:     Show information about the highlighted result.
  • Hold Cmd:  Show the full path to the highlighted result at the bottom of the spotlight window.

Hope these shortcuts help you improve your workflow and make your life just a bit more productive.